The Changing Past

When I started teaching at WOU in 2000, we would write and hand out to students very specific steps as to what to do on the computer.  Today I had the students set up blogs in blogger, I was not certain what they would find or if they would find the same thing based on their previous experiences with Google or Blogger.  So we did the best we could which not only got us to our objective, but we could be creative along the way.

Then we discussed some of the tools that evolved out of Web2.0 and recognized how much they have changed over the years.  I had become very comfortable with RSS feeds and Wikis.  Now major companies like Google and Apple don't include RSS and there are better and more fun alternatives to wikis.  Even college aged digital natives don't know what wikis are even though they use Wikipedia regularly.

Teaching technology has therefore become a process of understanding discovery and exploration and not following recipes and step-by-step instructions.  Fortunately digital natives are more secure in experimentation than us older cautious learners.

The Internet is a storehouse of information, much of it good, some of it not so good and some of it rather bad.  We need to be lifetime learners and understand how to differentiate between the good, not so good and bad.

Blogging in ED270 - Spring 2013 version

This will be different.  It's different every time I start a class.  The students have different names, faces and personalities.  I hope my approach is different in that I have improved the process.  But as much as anything this will be different because as a class in technology the technology has changed.  For example, blogger.com has new and improved features but it has also removed older comfortable features.

One purpose of the blogs for each students is that the blog is a collection point, like a journal, of all the activities throughout the term.  Of course, it also exposes them to the use of blogs both technically and theoretically.  So here we go this another term, another set of blogs and the possibilities that something new may replace blogging.